Estimation of Nonlinear Muskingum Model Parameter Using Differential Evolution

The accurate estimation of Muskingum model parameter is essential to give flood routing for flood control in water resources management. The Muskingum model continues to be a popular method for flood routing, and its parameter estimation is a global optimization problem with the main objective to find a set of optimal model parameter values that attains a best fit between observed and computed flow. Although some techniques have been employed to estimate the parameters for Muskingum model, an efficient method for parameter estimation in Muskingum model is still required to improve the computational precision. Therefore, in this paper, the differential evolution (DE) algorithm is studied for estimation of Muskingum model parameter. A case study with actual data from previous literature, the experimental results showed an excellent performance in its optimization result and performance analysis and demonstrates that DE is an alternative technique to estimate the parameters of the Muskingum model. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)HE.1943-5584.0000432. (C) 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.